Within hours of Australia’s shockingly large total remuneration gender pay gap being revealed, Opposition leader Peter Dutton defended a plan to push thousands of employees to return to the office full time.
And he did so while claiming that such a move “doesn’t discriminate against people on the basis of gender”; despite the evidence telling us the exact opposite.
Dutton also had the audacity to suggest there are “plenty of job-sharing arrangements” for women who could not get back to the office five days a week– an arrangement that would ultimately mean moving to part-time work and taking a salary cut. It also involves finding an appropriate person to job share with, and a role that makes sense for such an arrangement.
Meanwhile, Dutton also suggested that public servants are not getting anything done by working from home, and that “taxpayers are working harder than ever to pay their own bills, and they’re seeing public servants in Canberra refuse to go to work”.
This from the leader of a party that hopes to rebuild their voter base with women.
Women make up around 57 per cent of the public sector workforce. There is no evidence suggesting public servants don’t work as hard as their private sector counterparts.
The Coalition’s plan to remove WFH options for public services, along with other recent workplace entitlements, will only worsen the gender pay gap, according to the Australian Council of Trade Unions.
As ACTU president Michele O’Neil said on the Coalition plan, “Working women disproportionately have to juggle work and caring responsibilities, so workplace rights, like requesting work-from-home arrangements, are making it easier to keep their jobs.”
Meanwhile, Dutton has also declared he wants to end multi-employer bargaining – a tool enabling women working in female-dominated industries, like aged care and early childhood education, to access wage increases (and ultimately reduce the national gender pay gap).
Dutton’s comments came in response to questions from journalists on Tuesday, following a speech by Opposition Finance and Public Service Spokeswoman, Senator Jane Hume, announcing plans to mandate public servants work from the office five days a week.
Hume said that APS workers had been given a “blank cheque to work from home”. She presented figures finding that just over half of public service workers worked some of the time from home before the pandemic but the proportion is now at 61 per cent.
US President Donald Trump issued a five-day-a-week return to office mandate for all federal employees on January 20. Billionaire Elon Musk has also since been busy cutting the federal workforce. While thousands of workers have already been let go, other workers are rocking up to work to find inadequate office space available and even issues with the WIFI.
Dutton has previously announced his own plans to cut an expected 36,000 jobs across federal departments. More women than men work in the Commonwealth Public Sector Workforce, and are more likely to have flexible working arrangements. Combined with this five-day office mandate, axeing thousands of people across the public sector would be a direct attack on women’s workforce participation and, therefore, women’s economic security.